Slender young cheerleaders skimpily dressed in black and gold are dancing on the sidelines. A man revs up a Harley-Davidson before leading the New Orleans Saints on to the field through clouds of dry ice to play the San Francisco 49ers. The noise from the huge crowd in the Superdome is deafening. Amid the bedlam, three middle-aged nuns stand serenely in their long white habits singing the praises of their beloved American football team to this British reporter.
“You can't imagine their devotion to this city,” beams Sister Joan Marie. Sister Mary George enthuses: “Each player goes out into the community and does good things.” Sister Mary Andrew declares: “They couldn't be more appropriately named.”
On Sunday the Saints will be running out not at the Superdome, but at Wembley to play the San Diego Chargers to promote the sport on this side of the Atlantic. With their padded shoulders and grill-fronted helmets, they will look just like any other football team, but appearances deceive. The Saints have worked a minor miracle. They have contributed as much to the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as any political leader, government agency or corporate entity. The way they came marching home 13 months after Katrina wreaked such destruction brought hope and inspiration where there was only misery and despair.
“They saved the city, big time,” says Humble Levar, 31, a limousine driver. Keith Joiner, 46, a paramedic, agrees: “That's what brought the city back to life, the Saints coming home. They gave everyone hope.” Mary Beth Romig, of the New Orleans convention and visitors bureau, says: “The Saints saved the city - emotionally, spiritually and, to an extent, economically.”
When Katrina hit on August 29, 2005, the Superdome became the official “Refuge of Last Resort”, sheltering 14,000 desperate people - those too poor or too helpless to flee the city. As the levees broke and 40 billion gallons of water inundated New Orleans that number more than doubled. People waded to the dome through neck-high water. They arrived in boats. They were deposited by helicopters that had plucked them from rooftops. Nursing-home patients were dropped there with just their names pinned to their clothes.
Conditions inside the dome degenerated rapidly. Katrina ripped great gashes in the roof and water poured in. A single generator provided enough power for dim lighting, but nothing more. There was no sanitation, no ventilation. Toilets overflowed. Sewage backed up. People survived on military rations. They defecated and urinated in the corridors. They looted the concession stands, vending machines and corporate suites. At least ten died, including one man who threw himself off an upper tier. Corpses were dumped in catering freezers. It was a “total societal breakdown”, says Doug Thornton, the Superdome's manager.
After five days Thornton was evacuated by helicopter. “I didn't think I'd ever be back in the dome,” he says. “I was in tears. I thought it was not just the dome but my house and the entire city. I wondered how we could ever recover.”
A new football season was just beginning, so the Saints set up camp in San Antonio, Texas, whose mayor began pushing for the team to stay there permanently - and there were compelling reasons for it. The ageing Superdome had been trashed, and had become a worldwide symbol of horror. Even before Katrina, New Orleans was barely big or wealthy enough to support a top-flight football team, and its population was now scattered across the nation. But the idea that the Saints might not return to New Orleans caused such uproar that it was rapidly dropped - if the 33-year-old Superdome could be salvaged.
As the waters receded, Thornton returned with a team of architects, walking through the stinking building in respirators and biohazard suits. A month later the architects reported that the dome was structurally sound. That October Kathleen Blanco, then Louisiana's Governor, decided to rebuild because the rebirth of such an iconic landmark would provide a beacon of hope, and because the dome was the economic cornerstone of a city that depends on tourists and conventions for a third of its revenues.
Thornton reckoned the $185 million rebuilding programme would take two years. The National Football League thought otherwise. It set a seemingly impossible deadline of late September 2006 so the dome could host the Saints' first home game of the next season. Contracts were fast-tracked. Construction work began in March. A thousand workers had to replace nearly ten acres of roof, remove 4,000 tons of trash, extract 3.8 million gallons of water, replaster 750,000sq ft of walls, lay 68,000ft of artificial turf, clean 58,000 seats and much else besides.
It became a race against time. Many of the workers had lost their homes to Katrina, but worked round the clock to finish the stadium because they knew the city's future depended on it. “Every day you could feel the energy and intensity of these people,” Thornton says. “The dome was a poster child for misery and suffering. We knew if we could turn it around and make it a symbol of rebirth that would provide inspiration and hope for the city and send a message to the rest of the world that New Orleans is back.”
And they did. The walls were not painted and the corporate suites had only folding tables, but on September 25, 2006, exactly 70,003 New Orleanians packed into the refurbished Superdome to watch the Saints play the Atlanta Falcons. People who had not seen each other since Katrina struck, hugged and cried as they swapped stories. U2 and Green Day played When the Saints Go Marching In. Irma Thomas and Allen Toussaint performed the national anthem. George Bush Snr tossed the coin.
“We are proud to use this occasion to announce to the entire world that we are open for business,” said Rita Benson LeBlanc, the team's co-owner.
There was not a dry eye in the place - 20st football players, police officers and journalists all wept with joy. “It meant so much to all of us that they were back,” says Jerry Romig, 78, the stadium announcer. And it only got better. The Saints smashed their arch rivals, 23-3 before the biggest TV audience ever recorded for a Monday-night football game, sending the city into paroxysms of delight. “There was no one could have beaten us that night. It was electric,” says Drew Brees, the team's star quarterback.
The team had returned and the fans reciprocated. Though half the population had left, and those that remained were struggling to rebuild their lives, the Saints sold every season ticket for the first time in their 42-year history - and it was quite a season. The team had traditionally been so mediocre that they were nicknamed “The Aints”. But during their exile they had recruited a new coach, Sean Payton, and some outstanding players who chose to join the Saints precisely because the city was so devastated.
“For me and other guys who came here we saw it as an opportunity to help to rebuild. I felt truly like it was a calling,” says Brees, a staunch Christian who bought a storm-damaged New Orleans house as a gesture of solidarity. “No question it was an attraction to help rebuild the city and start something from the ground up. A lot of people thought I was crazy,” says Scott Fujita, a linebacker who joined from the Dallas Cowboys.
The revamped team enjoyed their most successful season, winning their division and reaching the play-offs before losing to the Chicago Bears one game short of the Super Bowl. After that game the Saints flew back to a rainy New Orleans in the early hours of the morning. To their astonishment, they found tens of thousands of fans waiting at the airport - they had come to thank the players not just for their sporting endeavours, but for rallying and uniting a broken city.
“The season was a miracle,” says Mitch Landrieu, Louisiana's Lieutenant Governor. “It gave people hope that maybe that's what the city's trajectory would be.” And, to an extent, it has been. Today the centre of New Orleans is totally recovered, with the French Quarter back to its rollicking self and the good times rolling again. The city now has more restaurants than before the hurricane. Tourist numbers are rebounding. More than 40 lively new “charter” schools have opened in place of the failed public schools of pre-Katrina New Orleans. The last 85 unclaimed corpses were finally buried on the third anniversary of the storm a few weeks ago.
One reason the Saints are playing one of their valuable “home” games at Wembley - and that some of the Big Easy's best musicians will be performing at the O2, Greenwich, tonight and tomorrow - is to tell the world that New Orleans is back in business.
But in the city's outlying areas, in the poorer eastern neighbourhoods, there is still great devastation. Pockets of rebuilt or repaired homes are surrounded by abandoned houses with No Trespassing or For Sale signs on them. Some have been looted. Some still display the black-painted crosses left by military teams to show whether bodies were inside. On some the high watermarks are visible. A few people are still living in trailers outside their devastated properties. Shopping malls and petrol stations stand empty and there is little traffic on the potholed roads. The city's population of 450,000 has fallen by up to a third. Only a fifth of the buses still run. Paradoxically, New Orleans now has the highest number of both vacant properties and homeless people in the US. For the past two years it has also been the murder capital of America. In some of the more lawless areas National Guard troops still help the city's depleted police force patrol the streets.
But the Saints are still out there helping. On a sunny evening, two days after their game against San Francisco, Brees, who is the nation's leading quarterback, arrived with his pregnant wife at the 400-pupil Samuel J. Green elementary school in an impoverished, predominantly black, area of New Orleans. He handed a $257,000 cheque he had extracted from Harrah's casino chain to pay for an organic vegetable garden.
Since June last year Brees, 29, has raised $1.6 million for a dozen such projects to help schools and children. About $500,000 of that money has come from marketing and sponsorship fees he has donated. He has made gifts from his own pocket, such as $50,000 he gave to Lusher School when told that its fledgeling football team had no weights room. He also spends time at the schools chatting to or playing with the children. “He's been inspirational to the students and the teachers. He's a hero,” says Kathy Reidlinger, who runs the Lusher school.
“I do it because I care about the city,” says Brees, who has a $60 million six-year contract with the Saints. “I am very blessed. I feel I've been put in this position for a reason.”
Other Saints players are giving freely of their time and money to help the city. A dozen have set up charitable foundations. They go out as a team to rebuild people's homes; organise charity golf tournaments; buy a bus for the city's Children's Hospital and bikes for hundreds of needy children and take them out on fishing trips. Reggie Bush, the star running back, gave $86,000 to resurface a high school football stadium. Payton, the coach, organised a fundraising dinner at the Superdome for 1,000 guests this month.
All this is good PR, of course, and the NFL encourages every American football player to help the sport's image by doing work in their communities. But the things that the Saints have done more privately suggest that it is sincere.
One player, Joe Horn, was so distressed by the plight of refugees shopping in a Houston Wal-Mart soon after Katrina that he went up to the cashiers, gave them his credit card and said: “Give these people whatever they need.” Another, Ernie Conwell, bought an engagement ring for a man whose distressed wife had lost hers in the storm. A third, Steve Gleason, bought 2,000 backpacks and filled them with pens and paper for children returning to school. Yet another, Deuce McAllister, takes 100 children shopping each Christmas. Some players have discreetly slipped cash to hard-up parents so that they can take their children out for a meal.
The city is bedecked in black and gold, the team's colours. There are many more Saints flags fluttering from cars and houses than Stars and Stripes. Black fans wear the numbered shirts of white players, and vice versa. “It has been a passionate love affair,” says Ms Benson LeBlanc, the co-owner.
Brees agrees. “Ninety per cent of people who come up to me on the street, don't say ‘Great game' or something about the season,” he says. “They say thank you for being part of the city.”
